But everyone will have the opportunity to get to know it a lot better this weekend.

The seminary will celebrate an open house from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday.

"People in Camarillo are only familiar with the tower that they can see, but there's so much here," Ford said

Visitors can tour the campus with seminarians, learn about their daily lives, and see the dorms, the Gothic St. John's Chapel, well-known stained-glass windows and paintings in the chapel and oratory, and the Doheny Library, which was designed by famed Los Angeles architect Wallace Neff.

"It's very much a part of the county and, really, it's a little jewel here," Ford said. He should know. A Catholic lay professor, he began his career at the seminary in spring 1967 and studied there until 1973. He came back as a professor of theology in 1988 and has been at St. John's since then.

Ford said recent work on buildings and gardens has added to the beauty of a school already rich with architecture and landscaping.

"The church started raising money for this place during the Depression and building came to halt, but resumed again in 1938," Ford said. The school opened in 1939.

Adolfo Camarillo donated land for the seminary to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the church set about to build a school, college and seminary.

"Originally, it was outside the city and sort of almost monastic in its use, but it was part of a 12-year system whereby boys after Catholic grammar school went through high school, college and graduate school, culminating here," Ford said.

The seminary's undergraduate college closed in 2004, but the graduate seminary remains open. Currently, 77 men are in the seminary program, sponsored by their diocese and church. Each spends between five and seven years in what the Catholic Church calls "formation."

"We want to share with people what a treasure this place is. It's an architectural gem and a place of intellectual inquiry," said the Rev. Leon Hutton, professor of church history and director of human formation and evaluations. "Our outreach is not only to Catholics, but to all people of good faith."

Hutton said the campus community is diverse with seminarians who speak a number of languages from Spanish to Tagalog to Chinese.

"We have people who drive by and wonder what happens up here on the hill, and this is a chance for them to come in and see who we are," he said.

Hutton said seminarians face an increasingly secular culture that doesn't look on the life of the spirit with the importance of material wealth and gain.

"There is a strong movement of agnosticism and atheism in our society, and that changes the texture of what we do," he said. "But this is a place where we men come to learn about a life that includes dialogue with God and how we can bring that to the world."